I haven't seen it asked above, so I'll do it myself: why didn't the dwagon (mount) take the hit for Jack (its rider)?

Same reason a dwagon wouldn't take the 1-in-3 falling death chance for its rider: mounted riders' health in Erfworld is apparently calculated without consideration for their mount. It's an important detail to remember, because it means a covered mount (like, say, an airship or a jet) would be purely aesthetic.

Not Me wrote:

I didn't mention it in the apprpriate thread (the one Judy uses the Arkenshoes to go back to Kansas), but if that scroll really does what they say it does, it kind of bugs me a little bit to think a scroll (I'll assume it was made by a trimancer link) can do the same thing an Arkentool does.

That's a pretty huge assumption. How do we know such scrolls aren't created directly from Arkentools? After all, there have been THREE of them: the carny's...and also the two that brought Parson and, long ago, Judy. What if all Arken magic can be bottled in this way, in exchange for the exceptional effort to transfer the energy and the obnoxious Schmucker expense?

_________________"The rumors which surround me are myriad, you know. Myth and legend, wild speculation, paranoid suspicions..."- Charlie, in reference to the forum members

Uncroaked casters simply function as infantry. A decrypted Jack may or may not be able to cast, but he certainly wouldn't be able to give units bonuses by acting as a warlord. He did not have that ability while alive. He can still command, but, no bonuses.

Infantry can be promoted to warlord. Non-caster Jack could provide bonuses if promoted.

Uncroaked casters simply function as infantry. A decrypted Jack may or may not be able to cast, but he certainly wouldn't be able to give units bonuses by acting as a warlord. He did not have that ability while alive. He can still command, but, no bonuses.

Infantry can be promoted to warlord. Non-caster Jack could provide bonuses if promoted.

Not only that, but rules about Uncroaked go right out the window with Decryption.Man, this entire thread page is full of quotes!

_________________"The rumors which surround me are myriad, you know. Myth and legend, wild speculation, paranoid suspicions..."- Charlie, in reference to the forum members

So I remain with the question, why did Rob decide to write this particular scene, which has been in process of being set up halfway into the current volume?

It's probably not permanent then. We've already got a means for Parson to "save" Jack, though the part about simply changing capitals wouldn't work since the Ruler has to be present to do that. Parson (or someone else) would have to form a new Side to open the portal so Wanda and Sizemore can get in and do their work.

Duty might actually compel Parson to split off into a new Side, since it would be in GK's best interest. Funny thing, that.

Uncroaked casters simply function as infantry. A decrypted Jack may or may not be able to cast, but he certainly wouldn't be able to give units bonuses by acting as a warlord. He did not have that ability while alive. He can still command, but, no bonuses.

Infantry can be promoted to warlord. Non-caster Jack could provide bonuses if promoted.

I'm pretty sure casters cannot be promoted to warlord. Else a frontline caster like Wanda would already be a warlord. I doubt uncroaked units can even be promoted, so the conversion to an infantry unit wouldn't help anything. As to decryption, lesser casters like Archons can still cast, so I'd say it is quite likely decrypted casters can in fact cast.

I'm sorry, but for me Jack's death is not believable not because it is anticlimatic, but because his actions are inconsistent with what we know.

Look at how uncertain he was giving those orders. Jack is smart, but he's smart at making overarching plans and at using his discipline intelligently; he has next to no actual experience in combat, so he's not used to how combat-time orders work and how they're obeyed. He's likely especially inexperienced at handling non-sentient mounts like Dwagons -- if he were talking to a human, they'd probably have understood what he meant and wouldn't have charged in that recklessly, blind in one eye or not.

There are reasons people don't usually bring casters into combat.

(And as I pointed out at the time, his death has been heavily foreshadowed -- he was very prominently positioned in that scene where Wanda predicted that Parson's strategy would succeed at great cost. The possibility of him dying and being decrypted has also been referenced twice, explicitly, so far in this chapter -- once when Wanda wanted to do it when he was wounded, and once for his initial plan when they were on the Dwagons, when Wanda would have caught and revived them when they died.)

But why he was so uncertain? We saw that even couple-of-turns-old Wanda without combat experience whatsoever handled her mount without any complications. And Jack was in combat at least several tumes, mounted. Also, since he is a commander, he inherently knows how orders are obeyed, and since he is a foolamancer, he understands how other beings percieve world around them (even non-talking ones - he can fool them too). These actions whould be far more believable from Parson who lacks certain Erfworld sences, or even Sylvia, who would just decide that fate will make everything alright and charge in on purpose. With Jack, actions on that page look to me as if a professional cook decided to chop some fruit (without noticing that it went sour), and because knife's handle was slippery, he plunged a knife through his own heart. And "but the knife's handle was slippery" is as inconvincing argument, as "Jack was exited from the combat", "Jack hadn't order an attack before", etc.Yes, there is reason sides usually don't bring casters in combat, and I believe it was stated in comic somewhere: casters are too valuable to risk. In battle you always can loose a caster if something goes wrong. When caster snugly sits in your capital, the only way you can loose him is to loose that capital. I don't think anything has ever pointed on the fact that casters' commanding abilities are inferior to warlords' (aside from battle bonus).Forshadowing and author's intentions almost never can be character's motivation, or cause of his sudden idiocy - since author and forshadowing almost never exist in-story.I have to add that all of the above goes for Jack's actions, not his death. His death saddens me greatly, but regardless of whether he will be revived in some way his actions on that page make him less consistent character and it saddens me even more. I would laid out the above arguments even if Jack had survived the collapse.

Has it ever been specified if the body remains for a set amount of time after it has been moved, or that it needs to be moved every turn to preserve it? Because Parson could begin research on how to bring others back while keeping him preserved if it only needs to be moved the once.

Of course, he could always make Memorials to the fallen at each captured city. Maybe a memorial would provide an small, non-leveling XP boost to newly trained units.

MonteCristo wrote:

Jedifweak wrote:

This is a bit too convenient. Jack decided to rush forward with the Dragon that's spewing sonic effects? The guy who's been gaming with Parson? Charging into a building you're collapsing is generally not something a clever fool would do, so why would this one? I think he and the Dwagon never went in, he merely made it seem like they were. After all, a wave of sound would destroy everything in front of it as though he had charged in.

The problem was that the dwagon was partially blind and thus charged in furthar than it was supposed to... Hence Jack's objections.

I'm only mad because you're completely right.

_________________I still think Jedifreak runs off of a vast macro library.-Jin AsiasYou could do anything you want with it. It's your dead fish.-Zorua

There's only one choice left for Parson, but I don't know how he could possibly take it:

Become an Overlord himself.

If he does this, the city he's taking becomes a capital again, which means that he can bring in Wanda to decrypt Jack and all the other corpses lying around, and maybe bring in some other magical support. Otherwise, he's completely cut off, with Jetstone armies in the field ready to splatter him.

Of course, if Overlord Hamster can take a quick stroll back to GK to discuss things with Overlord Stanley (especially if Stanley still thinks he has control over him), he can snicker-snack off Stanley's head by surprise (Rob and Xin could sell the print of THAT frame as a 1920x1080 wallpaper), take GK back as his own capital, and run things his way. Which is probably a "too good to actually happen" scenario for this comic.

This is a bit too convenient. Jack decided to rush forward with the Dragon that's spewing sonic effects? The guy who's been gaming with Parson? Charging into a building you're collapsing is generally not something a clever fool would do, so why would this one? I think he and the Dwagon never went in, he merely made it seem like they were. After all, a wave of sound would destroy everything in front of it as though he had charged in.

The problem was that the dwagon was partially blind and thus charged in furthar than it was supposed to... Hence Jack's objections.

The problem with that is that units can respond to commends they can't even hear, and react against threats they can't even see. Stopping when it was supposed to stop should have just been a matter of Jack's intent, not the dwagon's eyesight. Being blind hasn't been much of a problem for Jillian in the Inner Peace prelude, after all.

name lips wrote:

I also still maintain that Jack wouldn't charge into a battlefield when he had no juice. Not when he had been ordered not to. And not when he is such a huge asset to his Side. His reasons for doing so are so flimsy as to be nonexistent. He has no combat skills, and his leadership is cwap. His ONLY utility is in Foolamancy. So either he found a way to restore his Juice, or he didn't go.

You underestimate the situation by a great deal. Saying that Jack's only utility is his magic is like saying that a person is only as good as the number of bullets left in their rifle. Which is exactly opposite of the point the author has been making for a few years now: Intellect trumps bullets. Remember 25:1 odds in TBFGK?

Jack's utility was to go fetch a dwagon and do exactly what he did. Dying wasn't part of the plan, but then everyone in Jetstone is in a battle for their lives and units are dying all around, so dying wasn't out of the question either.

_________________How using capslock wins arguments:

Zeroberon wrote:

So we know with 100% certainty that THIS IS HOW TRI-LINKS WORK, PERIOD END OF STORY.

As a reminder, according to the klog we saw, inferno means the whole hex becomes ash. There will be nowhere to hide.

Especially with no one left to cast the scroll on him, Parson's Duty will force him to found a Side to bring in Sizemore (or to escape, if Stanley orders Sizemore not to go to Spacerock). Letting GK temporarily hold the ashen city site by way of the red dwagons as the only survivors would not do as much for GK as getting Jack's body to Wanda. Even answering the question of whether a decrypted caster can cast would be quite valuable.

Not Me raised a good point about how Stanley is going react to losing Jack. I don't think Stanley will be open to even hearing about a plan to found a new Side. I think he's going to be humiliated and insecure when it happens without his approval, and this (in addition to Jack's upcoming brainwashing) will be the story purpose of Jack's temporary croaking.

Can allied units prevent the capture of a city? Where is TV's bat? GK might need to find it. I suppose Don could even order the bat to turn to Jetstone.

Huh. It's interesting that Ossomer's turn back to Jetstone didn't need to be accepted by a Jetstone unit like Wanda's turn to Faq.

elecampane wrote:

I don't think anything has ever pointed on the fact that casters' commanding abilities are inferior to warlords' (aside from battle bonus).

I agree that this level of incompetence is hard to believe, but I think we've seen plenty of examples of the mechanic of a good leadership bonus being depicted by way of warlords (and casters directing the appropriate golems) giving orders that are much better than what the led units would have come up with on their own. The level of the bonus and the depicted level of competence should be equivalent.

Parson might be able to, after all if he can enter the MK so it's possible he functions like a caster in other regards. There's also ACE.If Parson sees he can't hold the city he might go for a deal with ACE: you cast this, Jetstone gets the city back and you get to live.

You need a reasonable reason for the Foolamancer to fool his own CW and spend juice he lied about not having. I can't find that anywhere.

I can think of a pretty good one - if the point wasn't to fool Parson particularly, but it was instead something he'd cast earlier. A conditional piece of foolamancy that would activate when the caster was incapacitated, to convince enemy units not to croak him. The obvious reason to use such a spell would be if it's something he placed on himself before the dwagonfall, when there was a decent chance he could have been incapacitated in the middle of a lot of hostile units.

That said, it has been Predicted that Parson will win here, which suggests Fate taking a hand to help him, and given that we know Fate has to take Numbers from elsewhere, I wonder if it might be the case that Jack's seemingly anticlimactic death could be caused by Fate pulling the Numbers from him to give to Parson to ensure his victory? It would certainly be the kind of thing to have a long-lasting effect on Parson later.

Uncroaked casters simply function as infantry. A decrypted Jack may or may not be able to cast, but he certainly wouldn't be able to give units bonuses by acting as a warlord. He did not have that ability while alive. He can still command, but, no bonuses.

Infantry can be promoted to warlord. Non-caster Jack could provide bonuses if promoted.

I'm pretty sure casters cannot be promoted to warlord. Else a frontline caster like Wanda would already be a warlord. I doubt uncroaked units can even be promoted, so the conversion to an infantry unit wouldn't help anything. As to decryption, lesser casters like Archons can still cast, so I'd say it is quite likely decrypted casters can in fact cast.

Uncroaked warlords do exist, and Jack wouldn't be a caster in that hypothetical situation.

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